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Friday, 24 June 2011

Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students

Over the last few weeks I have been playing with a very simple brainstorming and voting website called tricider. The great thing about tricider is that it is incredibly quick and simple to use, and yet it enables users to collect information and opinions from all over the web in a very easily digestible and powerful way.

It's very easy to create a tricider topic or question and you don't even need to register, just type your topic or question into the field.

You can also add a bit more detail and instructions to guide your students.

After you have saved the description, you or your students can start adding solutions.
Once there are some solutions added it's easy to either vote for them or add arguments for or against, using the + or - symbols.

Once you have set up your page you can add your email so that you get notifications when ever anyone adds something new or votes. You can also get a URL to edit the page (in case anyone adds something offensive) and a separate URL to either share with your students or post to Twtter or Facebook.

Here are some examples that I have set up to crowdsource in formation from my PLN.

Set up some controversial statements and get students to vote for the ones they agree / disagree with and leave pro and con comments. You could assign groups of students to all think of pros and another group to think of cons and see which can come up with the most convincing arguments. Example: Controversial Issues

Your statements could be about a particular book your students are studying and they could add arguments for or against. Example: Goldilocks and the 3 Bears

Get students to brainstorm word or phrases based around a theme. Example: Computer Phrases

Get students to vote on a list of topics they want to study. Example: Topics

Put up a list of favourite films or books or bands and get students to vote and debate which is best. Example: Favourite films

Get students to brainstorm, debate and share knowledge about any particular topic or even language point. Example: Present Continuous

Set up true false questions to check comprehension of a text.

Create action research questionnaires to get feedback on the things you do in class. Example: Things we do in Class

Create needs analysis questionnaires for your students or other colleagues. Example: Needs Analysis

Get students create their own questionnaires and circulate them online (through Twitter or Facebook) to collect opinions. You could also get the students to use this information as part of a written assignment.

4 comments:

my name is Stephan from tricider. Thank you for this wondeful post. It is very inspiring to see what you have created with our little tool and I am looking forward to hear more from you. :)

Many thanks as well for the ideas on how to improve tricider. For one of them I can already promise you relieve: Hopefully as of tonight you can end debates and get a nice view of your favorite ideas. I´ll be happy to hear, how you like it. As for the other features: Give us a little more time and we see what we can do! :)

this is Stephan from tricider again. As promised, we worked on tricider and improved it a lot. We are happy to say, that all the improvements you asked for in your post have now been completed:1. The archive button2. An export ability (to excel)3. And brand new from today: an embed code to integrate a tricision directly into a blog post, a wiki page, moodle etc.

I hope you like the new features. Any thoughts and "new wishes" are much appreciated :)